It just wasn’t one music company that was looking into E&O [errors and omissions] insurance specifically for the music business," related Larry Geismar, executive producer of North Forty Music, New York, and national secretary of the Association of Music Producers (AMP). "With AMP, we have voices that speak for a large collective of music and sound design companies. That’s what helped make this [E&O] policy possible."
Indeed, the E&O coverage comes as welcome news to the ad community (see page one story). AMP and the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP)—which entered into a strategic alliance last year (SHOOT, 4/14/00, p. 1)—played key roles in bringing the insurance policy to fruition.
And it’s strength in numbers—the AMP members, coupled with the resources and wherewithal of AICP—that has produced tangible positive results in only a year-plus. The latest case in point is the E&O insurance. AMP West Coast branch president Dain Blair, owner/creative director of Los Angeles-headquartered Groove Addicts, observed: "It’s a case of AICP’s experience paying off for us [AMP] in terms of helping to access the right people and resources such as the insurance broker and carrier. The strategic alliance [between AMP and AICP] has helped us to avoid some growing pains and to be further ahead of where we would be otherwise. Both organizations—and as demonstrated with this E&O coverage, the entire industry—are benefiting from the relationship."
As reported in this week’s lead story, the E&O policy contains certain exclusions, which reinforce recommended business practices outlined in the AMP music production guidelines released in October (SHOOT, 10/27/00, p. 1).
Those guidelines, too, were in a sense born out of AMP’s relationship with AICP. They were inspired by the latter’s well-established spot production guidelines. AMP’s national board devised its guidelines to serve as a useful tool for the business of creating and producing soundtracks for commercials. The guidelines propose to develop a better understanding of and a protocol for every stage of the process—from demos to bidding, from legal risks to project cancellation.
AMP hopes that the guidelines will generate continuing dialogue with agencies and advertisers, and eventually gain the stature of the AICP guidelines, which have helped define standard industry practice. At the same time, the AMP guidelines remain a work-in-progress in the sense that they will be updated to reflect changes in the marketplace and feedback from the industry.
According to Blair, the AMP guidelines have already had an impact. "In the last year, I’ve noticed an improvement in the way some agencies are working," assessed Blair, noting that a couple of Groove Addicts’ ad shop clients have stopped using temp tracks with copyrighted material that they don’t have authorization to use.
The thinking behind forming the AICP/AMP strategic alliance was that it would enable the music producers group to tap into the longstanding administrative infrastructure and organizational expertise of the AICP. Conversely, the relationship helps the AICP to meaningfully extend its reach into the music and sound design arena.
On a philosophical plane, when the strategic partnership was announced, AICP president Matt Miller observed that visuals and sound have become inexorably intertwined. From that standpoint alone, he said it made sense to converge "two groups covering the two main elements of creating broadcast communications: what is seen and what is heard."
